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<< Click to Display Table of Contents >> Installing the VPE ActiveX - The Demo Banners Are Still Shown |
  
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<< Click to Display Table of Contents >> Installing the VPE ActiveX - The Demo Banners Are Still Shown |
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| Q: | I use the VPE ActiveX and it works fine. But when I install my application on my end user's client machines, the demo banners are shown or I get OLE / COM Licensing errors. |
| A: | The COM Licensing Mechanism works as follows: |
As you enter your License Key in the VPE setup software in order to install the VPE SDK (Software Develeopment Kit) on your machine, the VPE ActiveX is automatically supplied with your License Key.
You can not call the method License() at runtime to override this mechanism. For the VPE ActiveX the License() method can only be used, to register add-on modules, like for example the PDF Export Module. The reason is that the VPE DLL is loaded immediately in the moment the VPE ActiveX is loaded by your application. Since for each edition of VPE there is a different VPE DLL (named for example VPES3235.DLL for the Standard Edition, VPEX3235.DLL for the Enhanced Edition, etc.), the ActiveX must know at startup which DLL to load and license.
When you place a VPE ActiveX at design time on a form in your application - i.e. when you are developing your application - the server (your programming tool) requests your personal VPE License Key from the ActiveX client and stores it together with the form.
If you later build your executable or deliverable application for shipment to your clients, the encrypted VPE License Key is automatically stored by your development tool within your application. Furthermore, the License Key is marked as "executable only", this means the ActiveX can not be used on the target machine for development purposes.
If you get the demo banner in VPE or any OLE License error codes regarding VPE when running your application, then something with the COM Licensing went wrong.
Visual Basic has no such problems, but we experienced that VB.NET, Visual FoxPro, Progress and Centura request the License Key only once from a newly inserted ActiveX and then keep it. This means that if you use the VPE ActiveX with the trial-version or with a specific VPE Edition (Standard, Enhanced, Professional, etc.), and install later the full version or another Edition, you need to delete the ActiveX controls from your application and re-insert them, so the new License Key is updated by your development tool. This is solely a problem of the development tool you are using - as mentioned before, Visual Basic for example has no such problems.
Please note that the VPE ActiveX needs to be registered on each client machine. This is done automatically by most installers. If you are not using an installer, call - for example from the command-line prompt - "regsvr32.exe VpeCtrl72.ocx" (regsvr32.exe is a tool, which is freely available from Microsoft).